Landscape design

Landscape design

Leonardo Ricci at the CSAC in Parma

Alma Gambardella

A small exhibition brings the master's poetic universe back to life to mark the centenary of his birth. Through nine projects that cover thirty years of his career

A year full of anniversaries like 2018 wouldn’t be complete without the exhibition Leonardo Ricci architetto. I linguaggi della rappresentazionepresented (until 7 April) in the Sala delle Colonne at the CSAC – Study Centre and Communication Archive at the University of Parma – and designed as a foretaste of what will be done in Florence in 2019, also as part of the Ricci100 centenary.

Born in Rome in 1918, Leonardo Ricci received his Architecture degree in Florence in 1942 with Giovanni Michelucci, whom he would study under, assist and collaborate with. He began working on his own in 1947 with an project for the Waldensian Agape Ecumenical Center, his first work of international importance, a true “real-life utopia” that explored that community ideal that would be a constant in all of Ricci’s work, working with local materials, such as stone and larch wood, and in synergy with professionals, students and future inhabitants. In subsequent years he combined his work as an architect with teaching, as a professor at the the School of Architecture in Florence (where he was president from 1971 to 1973) and as a visiting professor in the US at prestigious universities such as MIT and the University of Florida.

The CSAC also has in its huge archive (of more than 12 million pieces) Leonardo Ricci’s fund, consisting of 923 architectural materials. This small exhibition, consisting of a selection of nine projects – both built and not – developed over almost thirty years, is a reflection on the architect’s lexicons. Ricci’s architectural style (he was also a painter, set designer and urban planner) is tied to an existential conception of architecture, which rejects pre-established forms to give space – dynamic, continuous, asymmetrical – absolute primacy, modelled by the “acts of life” of those who inhabit it. The cases on display were chosen to illustrate the main phases of Ricci’s experimentation, going from Wright’s organicist influences in the 1950s to those of an expressionist nature in the 1960s, his research into different architectural typologies and topics such as volumetric aggregation, centrifugal and fluid space, spatial continuity, shifts and connections.

Among the projects on display is also his home-studio, the first of the 22 homes to be built in the village of Monterinaldi, above Florence. The interior spaces most clearly illustrate Ricci’s artistic philosophy, decanted into a single continuous environment achieved through the use of sliding planes, the articulation of the connections between the various environments and the elimination of doors, in order to tackle that dream of community, understood as a revolutionary idea of living, which he would carry forward through his most Utopian experiences of the 1960s. This experimental project would kick off a new design phase for the architect, giving him a reputation that would take him to the United States.

Founded in 1961 by Piera Peroni Abitare magazine has crossed the history of costume, architecture and design, international, following in its pages the evolution of our ways of life and how we inhabit places